And even though there’s no shortage of people parsing the FOMC statement to see where “the Fed will set interest rates,” the fact is the Fed has very limited influence over interest rates. To say it has ever had some kind of iron-clad control over market rates is surely incorrect.

The Federal Reserve’s control over longer-term interest rates is more indirect and more limited than its influence over the level of the federal funds rate.

So, why should we care about the Fed? Is there anything in the FOMC minutes that we should be concerned with? If they don’t control interest rates, what’s the big deal?

Because the Fed is a government agency that can – and has – created trillions of new dollars to bail out struggling firms, to stimulate the economy, and to buy government debt.

Because the institution itself is built on the conceit that a small group of experts possesses the knowledge required to manipulate markets for the common good, and that markets cannot otherwise sort themselves out.

One interesting fact is that, even when the interwar period is excluded, updated data suggest that the average length of recessions, as well as the average time to recover from recessions, has been slightly longer in the post-World War II era than in the pre-Fed era.